With the near-ubiquitous presence of smartphones among urban dwellers in many parts of the world, we are living in an age where the public can act as continuous sensors of urban spaces. As such, data collected from GPS sensors in phones are particularly suited to support understanding human spatial behaviors in cities, and their potential for societal monitoring has been much anticipated. Yet, the field is still emerging and practical steps for utilizing smartphone-GPS in human behavior research remain unclear. Over a decade after the introduction of smartphones, we review the use of GPS data collected by these devices (smartphone-GPS data) as a tool for researching human behavior in cities. Using methods and findings from 96 papers that investigate human behaviors using smartphone-GPS data, we present seven application themes that describe domains where these data have been used thus far: sports and physical activity, environmental conditions, health and wellbeing, places and movement, neighborhoods and society, tourism, and single amenity use. We also describe the methodological factors, including parameters and variables, that have shaped how researchers have used smartphone-GPS data to understand relationships between pedestrian-scale human behaviors and urban environments. Based on these findings, we make recommendations for future researchers using smartphone-GPS data to understand relationships between humans and urban environments, at the pedestrian scale.

For many university students, commuting to and from campus constitutes a large proportion of their daily movement, and therefore it may influence their ability and willingness to spend time on campus or to participate in campus activities. To assess student engagement on campus, we collected smartphone GPS location histories from volunteers (n = 280) attending university in a major Canadian city. We investigated how campus visit length and frequency were related to characteristics of the commute using Bayesian regression models. Slower commutes and commutes over longer distances were associated with more time spent but less frequent visits to campus. Our results demonstrate that exposure to campus life, and therefore the potential for student engagement, may relate not just to whether a student lives on or near campus, but also to urban environmental factors that interact to influence the commuting experience.